Beef industry renews push for approval of food irradiation

Randy Shore, Vancouver Sun02.20.2013

Tino Pereira, Pres of Iotron Industries with its machinery at their plant in Port Coquitlam, Feb. 20, 2013. The company provides irradiation equipment for the food industry. It hopes efforts by the Canadian beef industry to get approval for irradiation of ground beef will open up new business opportunities in this country.

As B.C. consumers face another meat recall, efforts to win federal government approval for food irradiation are gaining new traction.

The Canadian Cattlemen’s Association is preparing to submit an application to Health Canada to allow ground beef to be irradiated in Canada, 10 years after the last application stalled in the bureaucracy.

The application — expected in March — will include a review of the latest science on irradiation and a new opinion poll, according to Rob McNabb, general manager of operations for the Cattlemen.

The Canadian Meat Council, an industry advocacy and marketing association, wrote a letter to the Health Canada in December urging approval of that application.

Coquitlam’s Iotron Industries is hoping renewed interest in irradiation as a way to kill food-borne pathogens will finally lead to regulatory approval.

Iotron has developed electron-beam irradiation systems that eliminate potentially dangerous bacteria such as E. coli, listeria and salmonella, but the Canadian government has not approved the technology for use on meat in this country.

Food irradiation is used on a wide variety of foods in the United States, where the process was approved for red meat in 1997.

“The XL Foods E. coli outbreak reinvigorated the conversation and we happy to see the cattlemen leading that process,” said Iotron CEO Tino Pereira.

Iotron’s technology produces a stream of electrons that pass through materials, shredding the DNA of harmful pathogens. No radioactive materials are used or created in the process, according to Pereira.

Iotron is proving systems with two U.S. food companies, a meat producer and a salad producer. Iotron’s business in Canada is mainly confined to medical instrument sterilization and creating specialized industrial materials.

The company recently constructed a $15-million facility in Indiana where the company hopes to increase its medical and materials business and expand into food safety, said Pereira.

Although Health Canada received multiple applications in the late 1990s from industry groups seeking approval of the process for meat, poultry and seafood, irradiation is only allowed on potatoes and onions, wheat flour, spices and dehydrated seasonings in Canada.

A Health Canada evaluation of the technology found that irradiation of ground beef, chicken, prawns and mangoes was safe and effective at killing pathogens including E. coli, but the approval process was abandoned in 2003 because of consumer resistance.

There are indications that public sentiment has shifted.

A 2012 opinion poll found that 66 per cent of Canadians support having irradiated foods as an option when they purchase salad greens, chicken, hamburger and deli meats, and 54 per cent said they were likely to buy such products.

The survey of 1006 adults by Angus Reid Public Opinion was commissioned by the Consumers’ Association of Canada.

“Getting this kind of protection in place for consumers remains our top priority,” said association president Bruce Cran. “There’s some kind of E. coli recall of some significance every week, whether it’s in meat or salad or fresh sprouts.”

“The XL Foods fiasco last year is an example of what can happen and it could have been a lot worse,” said Cran. “We shouldn’t have to rely on luck to protect our food supply.”

The huge recall last September of beef products from Alberta’s XL Foods suspected to be tainted with E. coli added urgency to the Cattlemens’ application. Meat products were recalled in 40 states and across Canada and 18 people got ill.

This week, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Safeway issued a recall of store brand frozen hamburger patties sold in Western Canada due to E. coli contamination detected at a Brampton, Ont., meat processing plant. The inspection agency is still investigating a similar outbreak at the same plant in December.

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Beef industry renews push for approval of food irradiation

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